Two
of the feature articles in this issue shed light on the problematic business
of sharing spacea street corner or a countrywith others.Toward the end
of his essay, No Other Life, Gerald Early C74 quotes the line from
the song Downtown, which topped the pop music charts in the winter of
1964-65, about finding someone who is just like you and continues: But
what the song suggested was that the accident of finding someone like
yourself could not be predicated merely by a similarity of appearance.
For if it were outer appearance that truly mattered, only the most tribal
similarities, why leave the neighborhood?Early is the
author or editor of books on sports, music, African-American culture and
other topics, and was profiled some years back in the Gazette [The
Early Bird, November 1995]. This is the first piece written by him in
the magazine, however, and were delighted to have it. The essay is a
rich and nuanced memoir of his boyhood in the 1950s-1960s, growing up
black in South Philadelphias Little Italy. This is a bit of a misnomerEarly
notes that blacks had actually been living in the area longer than the
Italiansbut in his immediate neighborhood there were at first few, and
then no, other black families.He recalls how
he shared the Italians grief at the death of neighborhood icon Mario
Lanzaand his bafflement at the lack of reaction from other blacks. He
also tells the story of another local boy made good, Ernest Evans, who,
renamed Chubby Checker, was for awhile the personification of integration,
beloved by black and white teens alike, who made it seem natural for them
to mixuntil he forfeited his status as a raceless black man by marrying
a white woman.Earlys rare
dual perspective grew out of his mothers longtime job as a crossing guard
for the all-Italian St. Mary Magdalene di Pazzi School; the Italians in
the neighborhood, though clearly racist, encouraged the bookish young
Jerry to make something of himself. I dont mean to say that I did
not have some unpleasant moments with the Italians, he writes, but they
were very few and did not bother me much, not because I did not take these
racist moments seriously but because I had seen them in other guises and
understood, or at least could fully sense, the remarkable complexity of
their humanity.This passage
came back to me forcefully as I was reading our cover story, Blood Feuds,
on the Merriam Symposium, a conference sponsored by the School of Arts
and Sciences last fall that examined the roots and some possible solutions
to the worlds ethnopolitical conflicts. The kind of understanding Early
writes of doesnt excuse or forgive, but it does make it harder to hate
purely. Its oppositethe willful ignoring or outright denial of the humanity
of othersseems to lie at the heart of the battles currently raging among
groups who have come to define themselves, or to be defined, by only those
most tribal similarities.The Challenge
of Ethnopolitical Conflict: Can the World Cope? was funded by the late
John Merriam W31 and included panels on the conflicts over Jerusalem,
Kosovo, Kashmir and Rwanda. These were preceded by a more general discussion
of the causes of such conflicts and followed by a session that focused
on peace-making efforts. While there were some glimmers of optimism among
the panelists, for the most part the consensus appeared to be that no,
the world cannot copeor at least is not copingand the likeliest prospect,
as one panelist said of the situation in Kosovo, is for very difficult
and troubling times ahead.Perhaps that
vision of a union with like-minded others is always equivocal. Continuing
his discussion of the song Downtown, Early quotes a specialist in African
culture who told him that it led many rural people in Tanzania to leave
their farms and move to the city, much to their own economic disadvantage,
as it turned out.